The Duke Lacrosse Case: Ten Years On

A few weeks ago I wrote an entry regarding whether or not one should allow their son (or daughter, when it comes to concussions for soccer players) to play football. Today, I want to talk about how this case could impact the decision on when, where, and even if, one should send their son to college.

I. The Media

Perhaps my favorite all-time phrase I’ve heard on this matter was from a famous radio wag, “the state controlled media”, in reference to the current US media scene. Speaking of radio, I must give credit to the great Dennis Prager for his perspective on today’s colleges : “left wing seminaries”. Having spent four years under the Jesuits in high school I can verify the similarity in regard to the Duke Lacrosse case in particular. At Duke in 2006 (see the above link) it seemed that many in both the college and the community seemed to be worshiping the Holy Trinity of identity politics: race, gender and class. The fact that both the local North Carolina and the national media seemed to be “singing from the same hymnbook” harked back to my 1980-2000 extended visits to the Communist nations of Bulgaria, Cuba, China and the Soviet Union and to my exposure the military-controlled media of Guatemala during their long, bloody civil war.

II. Colleges

One of the memes one hears on campuses today is the mantra “white privilege”. Duke fit perfectly into this one since the school liked to call itself “The Harvard of the South (I began my undergraduate years at SMU in Dallas, which gave itself the same moniker, so one has to wonder how many schools tried that one!) . At roughly the same time as the Duke case, UVA (The University of Virginia) had a similarly hysterical atmosphere for a supposed rape case but UVA went a step beyond Duke in setting up “safe spaces”. These have become a fixture on many campuses and allows students who feel damaged by what they feel are any violations to the aforementioned PC Trinity. Here they can soothe themselves with soft, cuddly dolls and Play-Doh as they contemplate their miserable existence, which would be envied by 99% of the planet. One other recent feature on campuses is anti-Semitism, which is usually hidden under the guise of “Anti-Zionism”. This was seen recently at my alma mater, UC Berkeley. A man decided to have a one hour test on this by waving the Israeli flag for 30 minutes, followed by the ISIS flag for the same period of time. He was shocked to find about a 30-1 negative response to the Israeli flag and about the same ratio POSITIVE for the ISIS flag! Here too, Dennis Prager has been prominent in speaking out and he says that if he had an 18 year old he would recommend that he/she spend a year abroad or work as a waiter for a year to be able to cut through the PC-BS they’ll encounter on campus. Since my teenager is half-Jewish I’ve already passed on Prager’s advice and told my son that I won’t pay for college until he’s at least 19.

III. Family Court

Ten years ago a friend and I seriously contemplated having a class discussion on equal parenting vis-a-vis family court. We thought it could be a good media event to hold it at San Diego State University, which claims to have started the first women’s studies program in the nation. Needless to say, the atmosphere there, as well as on most campuses, makes it such that one would have to have severe masochistic tendencies to plan, much less carry out such at event in 2016. In conclusion, I want to mention one other meme that’s become prominent on campus, putting science on a pedestal, especially regarding “global warming (now, in an Orwellian twist, it’s been switched to “climate change”, since the globe didn’t warm nearly as much as the computer models predicted)”. The hysteria on this topic reached an absurd level this week when a well-funded foundation guru (and no doubt ex-academician) said it is now appropriate to invoke RICO statutes on all climate-change deniers. As they used to say in the 1950’s he’s got the right string but the wrong yo-yo. The majority of social scientists agree that children need both parents (there’s a bevy of studies showing the correlation between single parent households and a child having a proclivity for higher crime, drug/alcohol abuse, etc.) but I doubt seriously that this is extensively taught on college campuses and I’m certain that the link between family court and parental non-involvement is not taught. Maybe it’s time to take those same RICO statutes and apply them to the attorneys who grow rich keeping parents from their kids. And of course the media could have a field day looking into the fact that, according to a recent Wall Street Journal headline, Hillary Clinton receives three times as much money from attorneys as she gets from Wall Street!